Monthly Economic Report - September 2022

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For those of us that have been in the game - WE NEVER HAD MARKETS in POS - This ENTIRE Thing with CCP and JITA and the refusal to remove POS Code for all the time that Citadels have existed leads to questions being raised…

It’s not working…

CCP need to realise a few things but given they only seem to want to advance the “Online” version and the “300 ISK/Month” selloff they just did…

It’s NOT looking good for the rest of us…

W-Space is DEAD - You can literally do whatever you like there, Without disturbance…
Something needs to give (or someone needs to go - to CCP Fozzie’s Home for the Un-Dead)

It’s NOT WORKING CCP - It’s REALLY NOT - Speak to your player base and SortIT out…

Make a structure (that’s NOT A POS OR A CITADEL) for those guys that need it…

Find a Solution to the SHITTY MARKET thing that let the 2 MAJOR BLOC’s control things…

AND FFS - Invest some time in Amarr, Dixie and Rens…

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No, but the POS code interacted with the market code in weird and unpredictable ways, which is part of why they need replacing. As for ‘why haven’t they removed them yet?’… there’s still issues with doing that.

As I said in a previous thread, there are small groups out there that have supercapitals. One or two titans for bridging, for example. But they can’t defend a keepstar. And if you can’t defend it, you can’t have it. So where do they keep their titans? Safe-logged on a Fortizar so someone can cyno in a higgs-Lif on it to bump it off and kill it? No, of course not. They keep them in POSes. And that high-skill character is coffin’d, while large groups that already have every other advantage being a large group brings… get to use their high-SP characters in combat more often because they can have keepstars and dock up to get out of their supercapitals.

And that’s just one example of where the old parity of POS functionality hasn’t been met yet. Either everyone should be able to get out of the space-coffins, or no-one should.

If you’re talking about the Perimeter Keepstar, the solution is simple: kill it. Get a bunch of people together and kill the damned thing.

Just, you know, be ready to fight off all of the people who’ll join the war as defensive allies to come kill you when you try. That’d be the same math regardless of what kind of structure a player-owned market is in.

The inactivity of those markets isn’t a CCP issue. It’s simply a result of players consistently centralizing their market habits. No matter what CCP does, you’ll keep seeing one primary trade hub. Before Jita, it was Yulai.

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Yet Jita is CCP’s Single sole aim… Or so it seems…

There is NOTHING - ABOSOLUTLY NOTHING to support the other 3 hubs, and the other area’s of space.

Show me something that supports the other empires… cause the MER is looking pretty Shite if you don’t trade in Jita.

Screw this Citadel Crap - It’s not working - hopefully @Arrendis - discussion like this can get it changed bud.

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My understanding was that it was basically impossible to destroy, since the tidi would slow down the system enough that you couldn’t apply enough damage to destroy it before the timer ran out. Perhaps I was misinformed?

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This is an intentional feature, not a bug. Just ask the council of stellar management. The Perimeter Keepstar is a major campaign donor.

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That’s a very convenient line of reasoning pushed by the null blocs to keep people from trying.

But attempts have been made on Perimeter, and both we and Horde had to send fleets to defend it. So no, that’s not true.

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Because all of their previous attempts to decentralize trade—from encouraging production in null to actively blowing up the central trading hub in Yulai—have failed to change human behavior. And they’ll continue to fail to change human behavior.

They’d need to do something like not allowing people from nations at war w/the State to even travel to Jita… but that’d just get people making Caldari alts to do their market trad–oh, wait, they already do that so they can minimize the number of jumps needed to get the market alt to jita.

You are, in effect, arguing against Amazon.com. People will opt for single-stop shopping convenience, regardless of the damage it does to their local economy. And they’ll do so consistently enough to make attempts to engineer behavior to the contrary seem heavy-handed and meddlesome for CCP, at best.

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They were blue to Panfam, which is pretty much the same as being a renter. The only reason why TEST had OP was because of that. On their own, they could not have held it, which makes them indistinguishable from renter space.

The problem aren’t renters. The problem is that fewer and fewer chars are in null sec. That is the reason why these regions go to 0 market activity for long enough so that it becomes actually visible in the monthly data. Even after your glassing of Tribute or the glassing of drone lands in ancient times to get rid of the Russians there so that Skill Urself could hold the area didn’t result in 0 market activity in MERs.

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Not Null Sec is destroying the economy. CCP is. CCP switched to a more “hands-on approach”, as Rattati put it, where CCP wants to control and adjust market forces more manually because they, and Rattati and Psych in particular, think that they can do a better job at handling the economy than the game could with its old automated systems. This led to them increasing the moon mining yields because they wanted cheaper and more plentiful moon mats. This works well if there is lots of demand for this stuff. Problem is that Rattati and Psych among others have killed the demand by killing the player numbers. Now we have more material influx but at the same time much less consumption … and CCP’s intended more hands-on handling of the economy to keep things healthy is completely absent. And they wonder why people keep giving them flak for being bad at handling the game.

Speaking of the economy: Remember how Rattati and Psych kept talking about dynamic resource allocation in the cluster for months and months? I wonder what happened to that plan. :thinking:

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There did seem to be the sentiment that CCP should not be hiking up the cost of the subscriptions until the new content comes out.

Like most times of crisis, it needs to get significantly worse before it gets better.

If I had not already biomassed before the subscription hike I would have done so after.

Noobs no, maybe bots?

Can confirm knowing at least one person who cashed out several billion ISK of PLEX when it hit 7.5 million a piece. They have been in the game long enough that the profit on that sale was considerable.

So the tanking of income from DBM and ESS was not enough, that the last profitable component of null needs to go too? Might as well remove bounties altogether and just remove Null from the game as everyone will just move to abysmal filaments.

An alliance gets nothing from iHUBS. It would be a struggle to find anything that generates meaningful profits at an alliance level since passive moon goo was lost.

Industralists will not build ships that are easier to acquire though LP.

There was a brief glimmer of hope when Najara was flipped to the triglavians that the other markets might become relevant again. For a time Amarr seemed to be picking up, then everything looked to go back to just pack and ship via entities like the Frogs and Push X, etc.

A old school death star POS was more dangerous than a fortizar. CCP seem to deliberately ignore this and the nerfs to things like the point defence because dealing with the real problem of time zone tanking is too complicated.

I saw a region where there were two markets next door to each other because the US-TZ alliance wanted their own market separate to the EU-TZ alliance. Made fitting things like doctrine ships very painful and the gate between frequently getting cloak interdictor camped to catch idiots in industry ships.

Good question. Its like all CCP wanted to do was screw with the ISK made from ratting, as the industrialists have mastered the ability to screw each other over trying to get their market orders 1 isk lower than everyone else.

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An alliance gets plenty if people are renting the system: they get the ISK those renters are paying so thy can rat.

Yeah, but neither of them came close to touching Jita’s volume.

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@Arrendis - Sadly, this will be one of my last posts…

In “My opinion” you & the older CSM pretty much did the right thing for the game Bud.

As for your comments on Jita, and MORE IMPORTANTLY FOR ME - the other 3 markets - I beg to disagree.

I traded for 8 years plus in Amarr Bud - No issues at all - Serviced some of the biggest Alliances on Tour and of those 8 years, it was from a Wormhole - AND WE GOT EVICTED by TEST during that time…

For me @Arrendis It’s time to pack up now.

@Arrendis - you provide some of the best (for me) insights into CCP’s inner workings - I hope you continue to do so bud…

For me : - It’s time to duck out after a decade… I’ll NEVER understand why W-Space NEVER got CCP’s or the CSM’s full attention… It was the SINGLE thing that attracted me to the game…

So it Was…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAzpa1x7jU

I really do NOT SEE Any other ending for any space other than Hisec. Sadly.

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Well… if you at least still read this…

It’ll be a question of getting people active and in space. And I hope the new mechanics going in will help with that, though it may be a case of too little, too late, and every additional bit of ‘late’ makes it more and more ‘little’.

And yes, the lesser hubs survived for quite some time—but again, that was because of player behavior, not CCP. Once the Niarja route was severed, and Amarr became farther from Jita than the other hubs… it was doomed to wither.

As for why the CSM never focused on j-space… because j-space never organized enough votes to put multiple people on the CSM. The members of the CSM can’t advocate unless they know what to advocate for, and for the most part, people… know what they know, and don’t go looking for more problems to advocate over.

One of the big difficulties with space beyond high-sec, and especially beyond the empires’ control entirely, is that things should evolve. The null blocs should settle into empire-building, they should fortify borders and become stable, even reasonably ‘safe’ territories. That’s what happens to Frontiers. As they get settled, they become like everywhere else. They stabilize.

And things need to happen to up-end that stability, but those things need to be, y’know, fun for the players out there. They need to markedly not be things like the Drifter attacks 3 years ago, where small groups of NPCs spawn in random locations1 and then start RFing structures and attacking ships, but 1 guy actually gunning an astra can neutralize the threat completely.

Instead, consider the ‘front line’ system being talked about in conjuction w/the Drifter attack: drifter groups start coming out of the Unidentified WHs that we all already knew were in our space. The timing doesn’t need to be consistent, either. But it gives us places to post our scouts and recon assets, ways we can be vigilant for the sudden need to respond. And then give us fights that feel like fights, instead of ‘ok, if defenders show up, it’s boring. If defenders don’t show up, someone loses their capital ship’.

Because ‘be bored or be punished’ doesn’t make people want to engage with your content.

1. And ‘completely at random’ completely falls apart when 1 region has 3x the spawn rate of any other nullsec region.

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Pretty sure they have someone from j space on csm this time

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This time, yes. It’s happened intermittently over the years, for 1 term here and there… but only ever one. You know what 1 person on the CSM gets done?

Exactly the same as no people on the CSM.

The CSM works by persuasion, and if you go back and ask all of the former and current CSMs, they’ll tell you that you need multiple voices, working together, to get anything moved in terms of CCP’s priorities.

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Assuming the CSM has any real sway in the direction CCP moves towards, the way members are voted in is skewed in favour of the large alliances who can in reality guarantee council members and hence hope to move Eve in a direction that favours themselves.

In reality I think CCP pretty much ignore the CSM unless it’s going to effect their bottom line. They know the CSM is biased so don’t use it as a valid measurement of player feeling. This is a shame as if elections were controlled so the large alliances didn’t have such control, CCP might well view it as a decent dipstick for player feeling and we might have a healthier game.

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The CSM is a bunch of unpaid volunteers. The election is a clever ruse to make being on the committee seem desirable.

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Who the process of ‘election’ favors:

Literally any form of democratic process favors those who can organize large numbers of people. It is unavoidable. There are structural ways to mitigate that, but they inevitably end up reducing things to a minimal number of voting blocs with the largest membership. Think of the null blocs as political parties, and it starts to become pretty impressive that CCP’s managed to come up with a version where anyone else gets elected.

That said… the large blocs also tend to have the 20,000 meter view. They’ve got people who’ve been in all parts of the game, and their leadership usually understands that their game is dependent on the game, and that the rest of the game needs to be healthy in order for nullsec to be healthy.

I’m not saying they always act on that knowledge, and in the past there have been a number of bloc-level alliance leaders who’ve used their numbers to put themselves on the CSM (yeah, Gobbins, Vily, Piggles, I’m talking about you) so that they can make decisions and have their alliance use advance knowledge of CCP’s moves without technically ‘leaking’ anything. Gosh, did that alliance just happen to do X, even though their exec never explained why they were doing X? Amazing how that worked, huh? So there’ve been bad-faith moves made, but in general, even the null blocs acknowledge they need the rest of the game to be healthy, and have a self-serving interest in making sure CCP doesn’t screw up highsec, j-space, etc.

Does CCP ignore the CSM? Not… exactly.

Instead, CCP falls victim to the greatest sin any game developer can suffer from: being human beings.

From what I’ve been told by a lot of former CSMs over the years, the CSM needs unanimity to really be effective. The process is pretty simple::

CCP devs (or the people they work for) come up with an idea.

Either a) they run it past the CSM, or b) they don’t. If (b), then the idea obviously passes beyond the CSM’s influence, so we’ll follow (a).

If the idea is catastrophically bad, the CSM usually can all recognize this, or be convinced of that by one another before the next meeting where they give their direct feedback. Usually, consensus on the viability of an idea is variable, but the really bad ones tend to get unanimous opinion.

As long as the opinion of ‘it’s bad’ is more or less unanimous, CCP can usually be convinced to take the idea back to the drawing board. However…

If the idea is a CCP dev’s special baby, ie, they’re really dead-set on doing it… then if they can find even one CSM to tell them ‘I kinda like it’ or anything even vaguely similar… the fervent opposition of the rest of the CSM—no matter how much supporting evidence that opposition can provide—will often be completely ignored because that developer has gotten his idea validated by someone, and so is convinced they’re right.

And then we get trollceptors, individually overpowered rorquals operating in fleets of 200+, changes to citadels that make it pretty much pointless to own medium structures outside of a large, organized bloc, and so on.

Re: a dipstick for player feeling.

IT SHOULD NEVER BE THIS. IT CANNOT BE THIS. You very much do not want your ‘is this idea a good one or a bad one, and what long-term impacts might it have?’ focus group functioning as a measure of player feeling. NEVER.

Most players are not engaged with the community. They don’t give a damn. They want to do their thing and ignore the nonsense. Moreover, when the game’s working well, most players have had no idea about how to game-out the long-term effects of changes. Right now that’s a bit skewed, but only because the players CCP’s got left are the rabid die-hards, and even they’re not all that great at it, especially when you take EVE’s complexity into account.

Put bluntly, quite a lot of the time, a change that will garner a lot of ‘positive player feeling’ will turn out to be bad over the long-term, because that feel-good response isn’t taking into account second- and third-order effects. And when those long-term effects come into play, everyone gets mad at CCP for it, despite themselves being the cheerleaders for the crap they’re now mad about.

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Mature people who care about the long term health of the game will appreciate changes that might actually be detrimental to their own gameplay.

Going back to my “a dipstick for player feeling.”, I absolutely think this is vital for the game. Any elected candidate has chosen a mandate for their campaign and ‘should’ be elected based on that. They should listen to feedback from the player base and discern which concerns are valid and which aren’t given their own area of expertise/experience. A major point of the CSM is to provide CCP with a grassroots (aka playerbase) perspective on what CCP is planning and also the experience the game ‘as is’. If you think that the CSM shouldn’t provide feedback to CCP regarding player feelings about aspects of the game you’re losing one of the major benefits of the CSM - a bona fide forum for communication with CCP.

EDIT: I’ll add that I would think the the CSM should have the ability within themselves to ascertain whether player feelings are appropriate given ramifications of any change.

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The CSM should absolutely be able to provide feedback regarding how players feel about the game. But it shouldn’t be used as a barometer. They can tell CCP ‘this is what I’m being told’ all they want, but at the end of the day, they won’t be getting an accurate picture across the entire game because so many people will never talk to them.

As for whatever the CSM should be able to ascertain whether player feelings are appropriate… it’s irrelevant. Player feelings are both always valid (because feelings tend not to be something rational, and they’re not something you can just go ‘oh, ok, I won’t feel that, then’) and not really meaningful in and of themselves (because they can be manipulated by framing and presentation very easily, if CCP were to take the time to actually get good at their marketing jobs).

Moreover, the CSM should never… can never… be expected to advocate to CCP on behalf of what the players want, but rather what the players may not even realize they need. To paraphrase Edmund Burke…

It ought to be the happiness and glory of a CSM to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with the players. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from CCP and their election rules. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. With deepest apologize to MP Burke, his descendants, and literally anyone who’s ever read his work.

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